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sfcrazy writes with news that Linus pulled a patch by Ingo Molnar to remove support for the 386 from the kernel. From Ingo's commit log: "Unfortunately there's a nostalgic cost: your old original 386 DX33 system from early 1991 won't be able to boot modern Linux kernels anymore. Sniff."
Linus adds: "I'm not sentimental. Good riddance."

Actually what you want is a cat scan to make sure you aren't brain damaged. i'll tell everyone here the same i tell my SMBs when I got them off those power sucking P4s "When you look at how much useful work you get VS how much power the unit takes its simply not worth keeping" and that applies just as much to a 386 as it does to a P4.

I mean lets face facts folks, you can take one of those AMD Bobcats or Intel Atom setups (Personally prefer the Bobcat as it gets better performance for a pretty similar price) and get a dual core CPU that uses less than 18w under load, most jobs it'll use between 5w-8w, and you can do just about any task you'd have for a low power unit. A 386 when you figure in the PSU and board is simply going to use a lot more power for every unit of work you get out of it because back then nobody really cared about power usage, it was all about the clocks. And if you don't require 386 support frankly a $25 ARM thumbstick will give you much more work per watt while being even lower powered than the Bobcat or Atom.

So there really isn't a point to keeping any of these old junkers except for the case of nostalgia which if you want it for nostalgia you are gonna be running an OS from that period, like Win 2.0 or the first Slax release, so having support for such an ancient CPU really makes no sense. Personally if it were me I'd cut off support at the P4, anything older than that frankly is gonna be worthless for anything and while I hate the fact the P4 is a power sucking hog you can still get reasonable amounts of work done with a P4, especially if its one of the later ones like the Cedar Mill with hyperthreading or the Pentium D models.

What forced? Hell you can find units several orders of magnitude faster in your average dumpster! The super in my building knows I like to refurb PCs at the shop so I always have some ultra low cost units for the poor folks so since he services several office buildings and government offices they let him cart off the ones they are tossing and he brings 'em to me, hell I haven't even seen a P3 in like 5 years from the guy, its ALL Pentium 4s and now I'm starting to see the Pentium Ds and early Cores and Athl

I disagree. Dumpster diving has never been better. Nowadays, pretty much any typical dumpster find is going to a be a viable computer in the sense that it will do perfectly fine for what most people would want a computer for (assuming it works, of course - a good number of succumbed to the capacitor plague and it's not worth trying to repair an otherwise uninteresting P4 system). Perfectly capable of running the latest Linux distros (sorry no 386's) or Windows XP. Vista or Windows 7 isn't even out of th

While I don't know the product line, Wikipedia says the S81 had a minimum of two processors, making that 192 MB/processor. Still, impressive at the time. I remember buying a 486/66 in 1993 with 16 MB of memory and a 540 MB hard drive (Connor, may they rest in hell, that sucker was fast but never played nice on an IDE bus with another drive). That was a hardcore piece of work for the average Joe at the time and cost me almost $5000.

30 pin SIMMS are readily available at least up to 16MB a stick, they're used frequently in the vintage Mac world to get the likes of SE/30s and IIcis up to 128 MB of RAM. I can't say they're the biggest but it's the biggest I've seen.

I don't know about him but I have run Win 7 on a first gen P4 with 512Mb of RAM, not great but it ran. Sadly if you really want to play "How low can you go?" with Windows then you just have to run the pirate version, specifically the "Tiny Windows" versions. They were made by gamers trying to strip down the lowest they could go and still have at least 90% program compatibility and frankly it makes Windows Embedded and WinFLP look like bad jokes, we're talking WinXP full patched running less than 80Mb of RAM and Win 7 running great on less than 200Mb. Of course Vista Tiny uses the most of all at 480Mb, they're hackers, not miracle workers.

As for TFA I never understood why they kept it as long as they did. I mean is anybody here wanting to run the latest version on a 386? That seems to me to be just as dumb an idea as slapping Win 8 on a P3, why would you want to torture yourself like that?

You see THIS is why I would argue keeping 386 (hell anything below the P4, that's the 686 right?) is just pointless, its not like even the poorest of the poor is gonna be trying to run a 386 or 486 anymore, hell you can find freebies and dumpster bait several orders of magnitude faster than that so its really pointless.

And I know what you mean about older hardware, we PC shop guys are notorious for being packrats but there comes a time when you just have to let that stuff go. Hell I really need to clean out

I worked for Micro in the early 90's. I loaded up a 386 with 256MB of RAM. We made expansion slots that fit into the ISA slots. I filled every ISA slot with a fully loaded expansion card.

When the PC booted, I had the AutoExec.BAT create a Huge RAM drive, then copy the contents of the Windows directory to the RAM drive and launch Windows from the RAM drive. When we shutdown, we ran a batch file that copied the RAM drive back to the Hard drive.

It was the fastest Windows 3.1 system in the company.

First time I ran a computer with a Flash Drive on it, it felt like that old system.

You're wrong, or you were technologically savvy enough to remember exact details on how you did it.

Before 1990, I was using a 386 with 4MB of ram. In 1991, my parents purchased a 486sx 25mhz with 16MB of ram for $1500. The hard drive was 170mb. If you had a gig of ram, why even need a hard drive? You must have just created ramdisks and had a blazing fast computer.

By 1997, I had colocated my first server on a pentium dual xeon 450mhz with 512mb of ram. This system cost upwards of $2k to build at the time.

I'm almost sure 386 had NO support for dimms. So you used simms? Were they 30 or 72 pin?

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMM [wikipedia.org], 72pin simms did not replace 30pin simms until the mid 90's and were NOT present in 386's. 30pin simm sizes ranged from 256kb to 16mb while 72pin simm sizes ranged from 1mb to 128mb.

Before spamming us with your nostalgia, at least try to get your facts within a magnitude of the truth.

Bullshit. There's no way 16MB of RAM plus a whole 486-based computer would have gone for as little as $1500 in 1991. You could get a Pentium-based machine around 1995 with 16MB for in the neighborhood of 3 grand.

While you're correct, my first Linux machine was a 386DX25 with a full-AT motherboard, which I got in a case with a power supply and a floppy drive. Much of that space was used for 8MB of DIP DRAM (fully populated.) No idea who made the board. I added a 120MB Maxtor, 1MB Trident VGA card (ISA of course) and Slackware 2.0.

Intel EOLed even their embedded 386s sufficiently long ago that I had to go to archive.org to find the discontinuation notice [archive.org]. The last 386 rolled out the door in 2007.

There still seem to be some other outfits I've never heard of making x86s for embedded applications, but the specs on those boards are sufficiently primitive that they generally seem to be aiming for DOS, not the leading edge of the 3.X kernel tree.

Debian dropped i386 kernel images a very long time ago; the lowest you can go is 486.
Annoying for me is, that they also dropped i686 without pae. Meaning for my AMD Geodes I either have to roll my own or install 486.

Don't knock it, man... it was good practice for not being a two pump chump with the ladies. When it takes 15 minutes of watching the paper scroll to get to the good part, you learned to take your time...

Yeah, the whole of France learned about porn from the Minitel in the 80s, a 300 bit per second dumb terminal with 'advanced' ascii art. Advanced as in 'there are graphic characters with 3 lines and 2 columns of squares that you can use to fake graphics'. It took a lot of imagination, but that beast was turned off only last summer.

I never knew anyone who regularly made the distinction between "line printer" and "dot matrix printer" when talking about "line printer ASCII art". Sure, line printers were their own thing, but when used as an adjective, it was always synonymous with DMP. Now get off my lawn, or I'll rant about how ttys are actual teletype machines, and not just a damned serial port!

Ack, I was wrong: according to this handy timeline, [wikipedia.org] the last release was 2.4.37 at the very beginning of 2011. Were one to roll his own distribution and cross-compile, you could still make a surprisingly modern Linux run on a 386...

So, how many 386 computers actually have enough RAM to handle a modern kernel?

The size of the kernel had certainly bloated with module & stuff. Yes, I am aware that you COULD custom-compile a kernel with just what you need, but would that even fit in 32Mb RAM (probably a pretty good amount of memory when the 386 was king)?

I think most nice 386 'boards maxed out at 16 MB RAM, which would have been garishly expensive in the late '80s to early '90s. You'd have to pare a modern kernel down until you sweated blood just to make a command-line install squeeze into that space without paging out to swap... As has been suggested by others, the 2.4 kernel was probably the last realistic choice, and some would argue that going further back would be wise.

With DOS you can actually IRC from an original IBM 5150 PC. Mike Brutman's mTCP includes an IRC client that runs on any PC. The only thing that keeps me from using it regularly is the lack of multi-server support. mTCP also has an FTP client and FTP server (!) which have become my favorite means for putting files on these old PCs. Far more convenient than zmodem.

No big deal. I'll just keep the i386 CPUs at the current kernel version anyway. It's not like it needs to be bleeding edge anyway. My new embedded CPU boards are 486+/PowerPC/ARM anyway, so this is just a minor inconvenience.

But now that we're on the subject: it took a monolithic kernel for the project to be manageable to a single coder, and Linus made the original kernel himself. The Hurd isn't finished because a decent microkernel needs a lot of development time. Paradoxical, then, that the Linux community has a critical mass of development talent that could knock together a microkernel achitecture in a couple of months, if they wanted to, but the projects with

Nope. The point of a microkernel is about long-term stability and code maintainability, and run-time security. User-space services shouldn't be able crash the kernel, so the kernel can just restart the services. There are some elements of this in all *n*x systems -- print daemons and the like.

The Linux monolithic kernal was easier to get up and running than the Hurd microkernel, but there's a lot of legacy stuff drifting round the Linux codebase because a lot of Linux's development was hack upon hack.

Going further, I wonder if it is possible to rip the 32-bit parts completely away from the silicon at some point?

Do you want that to happen before or after ripping out the 16-bit parts? Even the latest 64-bit CPUs boot up in 16-bit mode. As far as I recall you still need 32-bit mode because there isn't support for switching directly from 16-bit mode to 64-bit mode.

Are there any AMD64 (or compatible) CPUs, which can be powered on directly in 64-bit mode? Supporting that would be the first step towards get

The historical significance of this of course is that Linux was originally written to specifically target the 80386, and it was written with the 386 with *no* portability in mind. So it no longer supports the CPU it was originally written for.

I'm trying to figure out if any user, worldwide, would be affected by this.

As pointed out in another comment, there aren't very many applications that will work. If anyone, worldwide, is using it as a desktop OS, they probably are on an older kernel anyway.

As for embedded systems : since new 386 CPUs have not been produced in 5 years, there's not anyone who would be designing a new embedded system that will use a recent kernel. There's old systems deployed in the field - but why would anyone try to upgrade an old embedded system to a new OS and kernel? A good embedded system is supposed to be reliable and simple enough it needs only minor bug fixes throughout it's deployed lifespan.

I'm pretty sure there will be no one affected. When I tried getting linux running on a real 486, it was pretty close to impossible with every distribution that claimed 486 support. I'm guessing they test on qemu (486 emulation seems to emulate something more than a real 486). Not one of the maintainers seemed to care. I might add, Debian was the only actual linux to work.

A couple of years ago I installed Damn Small Linux on a Gateway 2000 I pulled out of a dumpster. It was a 486 machine, and DSL worked reasonably well. DSL came with vim and I installed elinks from a.deb and compiled Pine and pretty soon had the same setup I did in the computer lab back in 1992. In September 2012 DSL put out their first release in 4 years, with very minimal changes from their 2008 release. I assume that it will still work on a 486. I don't know if a distro with a 2.4.31 kernel can be called "modern", but at least it's "recent".

I've got a Dell Dimension XPS Pro 200n that's been going nearly 24/7 since the late 90s, shut down only to move locations. It hosts a Citadel BBS for a small group of old timers. I replaced the hard drive last year when it started making alarming noises and crashing randomly but everything else is original. Some day soon, I'm going to virtualize it and find a cheap host. Of course, I've been saying that for over a year.

Considering the limited resources of such old hardware and resource requirements of newer software.... it is better to stay with lightweight older versions of Linux or other OS's to keep these systems in use. One such OS might be AROS.

sfcrazy writes with news that Linus pulled a patch by Igno Molnar to remove support for the 386 from the kernel.

At first I thought I was going crazy. If Linux "pulled a patch by Igno" to remove 386 support, then that would mean that he prevented the patch going in. So why does he add "Good riddance" at the bottom?

Sometimes, it seems these "removal" patches are more for religious reasons (aka break it on purpose) than any kind of technical ones. Same thing when firefox removed PPC or windows 2k support.

In fact I bet if you compiled a non SMP linux kernel it probably still works (assuming it does actually still work on a 486/pentium), as the majority of the patches are related to CAS and page invalidation, which aren't really necessary anyway.

Two major things: the WP bit doesn't work in supervisor mode on 386, which makes copy on write *very* painful to implement, and the CMPXCHG and XADD instructions which are extremely important to SMP primitives are missing. That has meant needing separate code that only works on 386, and it has not been well maintained and always gets in the way.

Horizontal limits are still a good practice, IMO, because I feel they generally improve readability.

80 is perhaps too restrictive, but the limit shouldn't be much higher. One problem is that the distribution of line width (and thus overall code density) in any sufficiently long file can vary erratically and this makes for inefficient consumption by a human reader.

Also, the power of parallel editing should not be overlooked! Sometimes it's nice to be looking at 4 source modules simultaneously.

You probably already know this, but linux never did run on a 286. The 386 was the first Intel processor with a viable "protected mode," giving each process its own address space, thus making it capable of properly running a multi-tasking OS.

I don't think there was really a 66mhz 386. The fastest I've seen is 40mhz. IIRC, the 486dx2/66 was the first clock doubled x86 processor which ran at a 33mhz bus speed. So if a 66mhz 386 existed it would have to run on a 66mhz board. Did those exist?

Also, the 100mhz 486s were DX4s. That's 33mhz bus * 3. Intel skipped DX3 for trademark reasons. Of course, you might have a 100mhz DX2 if you ran the board at 50mhz. You can do it with a Cyrix chip [alasir.com]. I don't know if you can do it with an Intel DX2.